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2014-08-30 09:19 pm

Into the Dalek

That was very fun, and much better-plotted and more tautly told than last week's episode. I liked the central idea, and the execution was good. But there was one aspect about it that really bothered me.

I know that 'continuity' and 'Doctor Who' aren't really concepts that sit together, but despite having revisited the Great Time War in the 50th anniversary special it seems that's now been retconned to 'all the Daleks were destroyed, except for the ones that weren't' and 'the war was time-locked so even time-travellers can't go back to it, except when they can'. Because what Into the Dalek seemed to show was yet another round in the Human-Dalek Wars of the medium future (as in the next few thousand years from now) as shown in various Classic Who stories. The Doctor, for no readily apparent reason, seems to have travelled back to one of those conflicts, rescuing Journey Blue from the imminent destruction of her ship at the hands (plungers?) of superior Dalek forces.

And this is where we get a rather odd take on the Doctor.

The repeated message of Into the Dalek is that the Doctor - or at least the Twelfth Doctor - doesn't like soldiers. He makes this clear as soon as he meets the crew of the Aristotle, and finally rebuffs Journey Blue by telling her that she seems a nice person underneath, but she's a soldier.

Well let's just hang on a minute. This is the Doctor who - as The Night of the Doctor showed - chose to become the War Doctor and fight the Daleks ("Make me a warrior. Now.") He did so because he finally accepted that the Daleks were an existential threat, and there could be no standing aside, not even as a non-combatant trying to help relieve suffering.

So why can't he accept Journey Blue? It's clear that the humans are fighting for their lives against overwhelming Dalek strength. It seems many of her family are in the military; she is serving under her uncle and was fighting alongside her brother until he was killed. That sounds like a culture on a total war footing, and frankly I very much doubt that any of them are volunteers.

Journey Blue is a soldier for exactly the same reason as the Doctor became the War Doctor: faced with her whole culture being threatened with annihilation by the Daleks, there was no option but to fight. So isn't it a little bit rich of the Doctor to judge her for this?

I wonder if we are being set up to tackle this, because equally much fuss is made about Danny Pink being an ex-soldier (and clearly one with a traumatic past). It seems likely the Doctor will have to deal with this. But if the payoff is going to be having the Doctor deal with the trauma of being the War Doctor (and a major point in this episode was how Rusty the Confused Dalek sees into the Doctor's deep-seated hatred of the Daleks) then surely this is just retreading ground from the 50th anniversary special, which was all about the Doctor coming to terms with this. And that was on top of the plot arc of the Ninth Doctor, which was pretty much to do with him being PTSD Doctor following the Great Time War.

Peter Capaldi is an excellent actor, and Steven Moffat clearly wants to take every advantage of that to do some interesting things with the Doctor as a character. I'm just hoping that those things aren't a retread of the last nine years' worth of character development but with added Scottish accent.
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2014-06-15 09:25 pm

Second Empire - or Daleks like they were in the Good Old Days

If you grew up in the '60s or '70s you might remember the Dalek Chronicles comic strip, either in its original run in TV21 magazine or (as I saw them) in later reprints. Written very early in Doctor Who's run, the strip established a continuity about Dalek origins that consistent with what had been alluded to in the first Dalek serial, although it was later rendered non-canonical by Genesis of the Daleks. It also followed the original depiction of the Daleks as having a somewhat wider emotional range and even degree of personality than the near-automatons they later became - although New Who reversed this to an extent.

Well, if you liked The Dalek Chronicles you'll probably love Second Empire, an amazing fan-produced CGI comic strip of some seven hundred pages that gloriously hearkens back to the old comic's design aesthetic and approach. The author/illustrator - who goes by the name MechMaster - clearly has immense enthusiasm and affection for the subject, beautifully capturing the aesthetic of not just the original strip but other classic comic-strip sf of the era such as The Trigan Empire.

Second Empire is set in a continuity of its own, neither that of The Dalek Chronicles nor of Classic or New Who. These Daleks are far more human in their behaviour - they even have names - and the strip at times heads into outright parody and humour. But it's also well-written, chock-full of references, and features an amazing gamut of Dalek designs based on everything ever seen in comics or on TV (or in some cases, only in early concept art). I actually think MechMaster's rendering of the basic Dalek design is perhaps the most convincing-looking I've seen, even more so than the more realistically-rugged redesign done for New Who. (The less said of the godawful New Paradigm Daleks the better, and Second Empire even gets in a joke at their expense.)

I came across Second Empire looking for comments on a rather different Dalek-related spin-off I'm planning to review. Second Empire could hardly contrast more in tone with I, Davros but it certainly pleased my inner 9-year-old, whilst giving the actual 45-year-old me some good chuckles of recognition.